Low self-esteem can affect far more than the way you feel about yourself. It can influence your relationships, your confidence, the choices you make and what you believe you deserve from life.
You may find yourself constantly questioning whether you are good enough, comparing yourself to others, struggling to accept compliments or feeling that you need to achieve, please or prove yourself in order to feel worthy.
Sometimes, you may know logically that you are capable, worthy and deserving, yet a deeper part of you still doesn’t believe it.
Where does low self-esteem come from?
Low self-esteem isn’t always caused by one obvious experience. Sometimes it develops gradually through repeated experiences of being criticised, rejected, compared, bullied, controlled or made to feel that your needs didn’t matter.
For some people, it can be connected to childhood experiences where they didn’t feel seen, understood, accepted or emotionally safe. For others, it may develop following a difficult relationship, workplace experiences, loss, betrayal or another period in life when their sense of themselves was shaken.
Over time, these experiences can become internalised.
You may begin to carry beliefs such as:
- “I’m not good enough.”
- “There’s something wrong with me.”
- “I’m not important.”
- “I have to get things right.”
- “People will reject me if I disappoint them.”
- “I have to look after everyone else.”
- “I don’t deserve good things.”
These beliefs can feel like facts, even when they don’t reflect who you are today.
How can EMDR help?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is often associated with treating PTSD and traumatic experiences, but it can also be helpful when difficult experiences have affected the way you see yourself.
Rather than simply trying to replace negative thoughts with positive ones, EMDR can help us explore the experiences that may have contributed to these beliefs in the first place.
During EMDR, we identify memories, situations or experiences that still feel emotionally charged. This might be a significant event, but it could also be a collection of smaller experiences that happened repeatedly over time.
When these experiences are processed, the emotional intensity associated with them can reduce. You may begin to experience them as something that happened to you, rather than something that defines you.
The aim isn’t to erase memories or pretend that difficult things didn’t happen. It is about helping your mind and body process what happened so that the past has less influence over how you feel about yourself in the present.
From “I’m not good enough” to a different sense of yourself
One of the things I find particularly meaningful about EMDR is the possibility of developing a different relationship with yourself.
As difficult experiences are processed, there may be more space for healthier and more compassionate beliefs to emerge.
Instead of:
“I’m not good enough.” You might begin to feel: “I am enough as I am.”
Instead of:
“I have to please everyone.” You might develop a stronger sense that: “My needs matter too.”
And instead of constantly questioning yourself, you may begin to trust your own feelings, decisions and instincts more.
This isn’t about forcing yourself to think positively. It is about creating the conditions for a more realistic, compassionate and grounded sense of self to develop.
Developing a more compassionate inner voice
For some people, low self-esteem is accompanied by a very harsh inner critic. You may notice a constant internal commentary telling you that you’re not doing enough, that you’ve got something wrong, or that you should be better, thinner, more successful, more capable or more likeable.
Sometimes this inner critic can feel so familiar that you barely notice it anymore. It may have developed from the voices and attitudes of people or environments you experienced earlier in life.
As part of EMDR, we can work with this critical part of you and explore what you need instead.
EMDR can also be used to install a compassionate figure or resource, someone real, imagined or symbolic who embodies qualities such as warmth, acceptance, protection, encouragement and understanding. This might be a person from your life, a nurturing figure you imagine, or even a compassionate version of yourself.
Through bilateral stimulation, we can strengthen the felt sense of these qualities so that they become more accessible when the inner critic appears.
Over time, the aim is not necessarily to make the critical voice disappear completely. Instead, you can develop another internal voice that is able to respond to it with greater compassion and perspective.
Rather than:
“I’m useless. I always get things wrong.” there may gradually be another part of you able to respond: “You’re struggling right now, but that doesn’t mean you’re failing. You don’t have to be perfect to be worthy.”
For someone who has spent years being hard on themselves, developing an internal experience of compassion can be a profound part of the therapeutic process.
It isn’t about forcing yourself to “think positively”. It is about helping you experience, perhaps for the first time, what it feels like to have an inner relationship that is supportive rather than critical.
EMDR and the body
Low self-esteem isn’t just something that happens in your thoughts.
You may notice it physically too. Perhaps you become tense when someone disagrees with you, feel anxious when receiving attention, experience a strong urge to apologise, or find yourself shrinking or becoming very quiet when you feel criticised.
This is why I take a trauma-informed approach to EMDR. We don’t need to rush into difficult memories. Establishing a sense of safety, stability and trust is an important part of the process.
We work at a pace that feels manageable for you.
You are more than the experiences that shaped you
If you have spent years believing that something is wrong with you, it can be difficult to imagine feeling differently.
But low self-esteem isn’t necessarily a reflection of who you are. Sometimes it is the result of what you have experienced and the conclusions you had to make about yourself in order to make sense of those experiences.
EMDR can offer an opportunity to revisit some of those experiences with the perspective, resources and understanding you have now.
You don’t have to spend the rest of your life carrying the belief that you aren’t good enough.
Therapy can be a space to begin understanding where that belief came from and to discover who you are beyond it.